The question
What is the worst job you have ever had?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's long-running Q&A repeatedly asks this standing question, with minor tense variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
When I was 16, at the beginning of the summer vacation, I worked in a factory that made industrial valves and I was a much worse industrial valve producer than historian.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 October 2021 source ↗
Telesales. I refused to wear a tie, but my argument that “They can’t see what we’re wearing” didn’t wash with the manager and I lasted a week.
Giving barium enemas. I used to be a radiographer in Coventry.
Living in a campervan for a week with Timmy Mallett for a children’s TV show about 40 years ago.
Maybe That’s Your Problem, a musical about premature ejaculation. It closed after only 18 performances.
That I still don’t understand life. When I was young, I thought at some point I would find somebody who does. I am 45, and there is a good chance that I’ll never meet somebody like that.
I was almost run over by a bus when I was 13. And in 1991, in the Gulf war, an Iraqi missile hit close to my house.
When my dog died a couple of years ago. We were in Greece on vacation and a friend was watching her at home, and she was bitten by a snake. We rushed home, but we were too late by a few hours.
On a personal level, the friend who is a single mum raising two kids by herself during this Covid era. She is a real hero. If a historical personality, I choose Mikhail Gorbachev, who probably saved the world from world war three.
Now. I’ve learned to adjust my expectations to reality better than when I was 20 or 10.
I would like to come out at 16 or 17, and not 21.
Steph McGovern, David Hasselhoff, Sofia Helin, Malcolm Gladwell, Sheena Easton, Elaine Paige
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